You looked better on MySpace…

I was reading B.L. Ochman’s blog today when I saw this YouTube clip, which had me sniggering and chuckling along. The video content is quite dense and WAY too fast in some cases, but the overall effect is just hilarious. It’s a clever parody on the glut of web 2.0 business plans and often excessive valuations floating around Silicon Valley these days. That’s enough preamble - check the clip out for yourself:

Look out for smashing lines like “find yourself an engineer, feed him pizza, buy him beer” and “make your elevator pitch, code it up, and flip the switch”. Followed by an instant Internal Server Error, of course. All to the pumping soundtrack of a homemade version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel. Fair use indeed.

Who exactly is behind this farcical look at Silicon Valley, you ask? Credit goes to Matt Hempey from a group called The Richter Scales for publishing this video - it’s really clever stuff. According to their website, it’s “a bevy of gentlemen songsters, all residents of the San Francisco Bay Area”. Local talent no less…

So I was trying to figure out what I liked about this video aside from the catchy tune and funny gags. It certainly does a great job of exposing the opportunists with half-baked ideas jumping on the web 2.0 bandwagon. What better showcase for this behavior than the sardonic example of a company founded to sell friendship bracelets online? It also harkens back to some classic Dotcom busts like Webvan - hey, I remember them and I was a loyal customer for about 3 months…until I got tired of getting pigmy vegetables that looked great on the website, were perfectly formed, but wouldn’t feed baby hamster.

Excessive valuations on companies like Facebook, Skype, and aQuantive are all skewered in the clip, although Ford Motor Company probably isn’t the best counter example these days! The venture capitalists get a good roast for throwing their weight behind the transformative potential of friendship bracelets - the “next wave” of the web and good potential for affiliate programs, I suppose. Towards the end, the clip focuses on exuberant greed, the skyward property ladder, corporate jets, rocket ships, ego trips - it’s all on the money. But the best bit for me, hands-down, is the following line printed on a t-shirt towards the end of the clip: “You looked better on MySpace”. We’re still a bit wary of the web, no matter how much time we spend on it.

I like these attempts to poke fun at the Silicon Valley business culture, which takes itself very seriously most of the time. There’s no doubt that the Valley is a place where many ideas (good, bad, and ugly) get the chance to see the light of day. Maybe it is better to be lucky than good in this world, but for all the griping, you don’t build a great business on bad ideas. Lucky they may be, but there’s one thing that Google, Facebook, Feedburner, Skype, and others have in common. They all started with great ideas that lived to see the light of day. It is hard to resist poking fun at the culture that spawned them every now and again, all the same. I’m going to watch this clip one last time…then it’s back to riding the next wave I suppose.

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